I hate band trips. Of course the kids are awful, but the paperwork is too. Especially when there's interplanetary travel involved. Or interdimensional. It's all the same to me in terms of the visas and the passports.

By this school's very nature, most of our students are "undocumented" in one way or another, so filling out these forms becomes a creative writing experiment. "Benjamin Srinivasa Ramanujan" and "Nancy Shakuntala Devi" make up almost half our wind section. All the better when I don't use the kids' real names, frankly, because of the cost these immigration devils demand. You'd think you'd have to sell a piece of your soul to just set foot in a nearby planet's moon system. Well, in fact, you do in a lot of them. The Ancient Ones have a grip around the portals and they're not interested in letting anybody through for free, but at the same time they're so busy and there's so much bureaucracy that with just a little bit of know-how you can find your way through. I guess that's a teacher's real value today: experienced paper-pusher.

Psychic High School students are full of themselves. Sure, a lot of them have preternatural ability on wind, reed, brass, and percussion instruments—and I’m not even going to talk about strings—but these kids start to push their psychic power through a clarinet or a trumpet and they think they own the world.

I teach psychic symphonic band and psychic marching band and psychic pep band and the psychic jazz band. Psychic orchestra I am not. But have you seen psychic band kids assert their collective force over a teacher? Consider a substitute confronted with a class of armed students. That's what being a band teacher is like every day. The students actually control the Means of Production, and if you're familiar with Marxist Band Theory then you know what that means.